Who remembers Galleani? Same obscurity awaits bin Laden

On Sept. 16, 1920, a man parked a horse-drawn wagon across the street from the headquarters of J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street in New York City - about 500 metres south of what we now call Ground Zero - and walked away. Moments later, the wagon exploded.

By modern truck-bomb standards, the charge was modest - just 45 kilograms of dynamite. Nevertheless, the wagon-bombing killed 38 passersby, plus the man's horse. At the time, it was the deadliest act of terrorism in U.S. history.

America's response - a foreshadowing of the post-9/11 era - included a crackdown on foreign extremists and an expansion of federal police powers. Eventually, American authorities also turned their attention to the wagon-bomber's alleged inspiration, a notorious terrorism advocate and insurrectionary anarchist who some might call the Osama bin Laden of his day: Luigi Galleani.

Luigi who? Exactly.

Today, no one talks about Luigi Galleani. Nor do they talk about the violent "Galleanists" he inspired. Nor his anarcho-communist ideas. Galleani's methods and rhetoric, terrifying as they were to Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, are now the stuff of history courses and obscure Internet sites. I believe the same will be true of Osama bin Laden and his fellow jihadists by the beginning of the next century, if not sooner.

Luigi Galleani (1861-1931) became an anarchist in the late 1870s while studying at the University of Turin. It was a period of rapid industrialization in northern Italy. And like many communists and anarchists, he was appalled at the manner by which capitalism was transforming the once-pastoral Europe into something he saw as oppressive, inhumane and corrupt.

While Galleani claimed that anarchism was superior to socialism (which he dismissed as "timid"), both ideologies - as well as full-blown communism, and even Nazism - were fundamentally alike in that they offered radical solutions to the destruction of traditional values, attachments and lifestyles wrought upon Europe by war, industrialization and the free market.

Anarcho-syndicalists bickered with Bolsheviks, syndicalists and everyone else with a placard. But at root, all the great revolutionary isms that turned bloody in the early 20th century reflected essentially this same violent spasm of rebellion.

The same forces, broadly speaking, are propelling militant Islam in our own age.

Until oil was discovered in the middle of the 20th century, Saudi Arabia was a desert wasteland populated mostly by nomadic tribesmen. All of its stunning rise to oil-fuelled prosperity took place within the last 70 years. Osama bin Laden bore witness to much of this. His father was a billionaire construction magnate who built great swaths of Saudi Arabia's modern infrastructure, all at the pleasure of the country's spoiled and dissolute royal family. Almost all of bin Laden's lieutenants came from similar backgrounds: tribal, religiously observant Arab societies dragged somewhat traumatically into decadent, quasi-modernity by corrupt elites.

Galleani's anarchism and bin Laden's militant Islam share nothing doctrinally. But they both are nihilistic, hyper-violent creeds that reduce all of society's complex troubles to the machinations of some identifiable group of alleged evildoers - Wall Street bankers and other capitalist "tyrants" for Galleani's followers, Americans, Zionists and "infidels" for bin Laden. Both creeds imagine that mass murder can spur the arrival of utopia - whether a worker's paradise, or a recreation of Muhammad's 6th century theocracy.

Because this struggle is always described in apocalyptic terms, these terrorist movements claim the right to suspend the ordinary rules of human morality and employ hideous tactics such as mass, indiscriminate slaughter.

Like Bin Laden, Galleani sought to inspire lone wolves to kill creatively and spontaneously. In 1905, he even mass-published a printed guide to producing nitroglyc-erine-based bombs - under the bizarre title "Health Is In You!" - and sold it for 25 cents. A decade later, a Gal-leanist cook served arsenic-laced soup at a large banquet attended by some of Chicago's wealthiest citizens. All of it was done under the all-purpose slogan "propaganda of the deed."

The good news, history teaches us, is that terrorist cults are morally self-extinguishing: Ordinary people become alienated by any movement that makes a systematic practice of killing innocent people. Far from stirring up a popular revolution, the 1920 Wall Street bombing and similar attacks contributed to anarchism's and Marxism's foul odour in the United States. By the time Galleani died of natural causes in 1931, his movement had all but collapsed. From start to finish, its campaign to bring down the U.S. government lasted less than 20 years.

The same pattern is playing out with bin Ladenism: Ordinary Muslims are no longer taken in by a nihilistic death cult that sanctifies mass slaughter according to a perverse reading of Islamic scripture. Bin Laden himself died in 2011, but his ideology began dying two years after 9/11, once Muslims - in Iraq especially - began witnessing the horrible, inhuman toll taken by suicide bombings in their own lands.

In fact, the person who likely did the most to kill off al-Qaida's influence among Muslims wasn't George W. Bush or Barack Obama, but Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a sadistic Jordanian criminal who served as leader of al-Qaida in Iraq until he was killed in a 2006 U.S. bombing raid.

Before Zarqawi, the practice of mass-casualty Islamist terrorism was primarily associated with attacks on Western targets, such as the Twin Towers in 2001, or Paddy's Pub, a tourist hangout on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002.

But Zarqawi focused his campaign of extermination against Shiite Muslims, including shrines in Karbala and Baghdad, and the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra. Other tactics included the creation of hideous jihadi-snuff films featuring prisoners being decapitated. Muslims around the world were absolutely horrified by all this, and even al-Qaida's leadership in Afghanistan appears to have realized that Zarqawi was destroying their brand. According to one study, al-Qaida was killing eight Muslims for every infidel it murdered.

Nine decades from now, a mention of Osama bin Laden's name will elicit the same blank, unknowing response from most people as Luigi Galleani's does today.

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Who remembers Galleani? Same obscurity awaits bin Laden

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